God’s Little Acre is Erskine Caldwell’s follow-up novel to Tobacco Road (1932), and it is considered by most critics to be Caldwell’s finest novel. While Tobacco Road illustrates the death of the pastoral ideal in Southern agriculture, God’s Little Acre continues Caldwell’s critique of the sharecropping and cotton farming while also investigating the textile mill as a possible replacement or positive alternative for Southern workers. While the novel is often categorized as proletarian fiction, it is perhaps better thought of as social protest fiction, since Caldwell is more interested in exposing class oppression and exploitative working conditions than he is in offering socialist or communist analyses or solutions.
The narrative alternates between Ty Ty Walden’s Georgia cotton farm and the mill town of Scottsville, South Carolina, just across the river. The settings are linked by...
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Citation: Rieger, Christopher. "God's Little Acre". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 July 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4954, accessed 09 June 2026.]
